One Stop Shops at Wychavon District Council deliver more custome value with SmartPoint

Thursday 7th August 2008, London, UK. Wychavon District Council, part of the Worcestershire Hub, has implemented SmartPoint in its three one stop shops to enable advisors to offer a faster, more accurate and higher value service to its customers with a single point of access to customer information stored in multiple back office applications.

With a population of over 115,000, Wychavon has 50,000 households in urban and rural communities. Although its three main towns are Droitwich, Evesham and Pershore, it is primarily a widespread rural area with nearly 100 villages scattered across 260 square miles in the eastern part of the county of Worcestershire.

“With such a wide area, being able to locate customer details, services and related amenities at a single point is tremendously important for our staff and customers alike,” said Cheryl Peters, business analyst, Wychavon District Council. “Customers don’t perceive the council to be made up of a number of separate departments therefore there is a need to provide a single point of contact for our customers,” she continued.

Wychavon uses Onyx eShop as its CRM system and needed to interface to its other back office applications. One stop shop advisors would sometimes have up to nine different application windows open at any one time. For management, this meant purchasing licenses for all advisors for each application and the subsequent training overheads. In addition, each application has a different method of searching for information, for example, one application might search by surname, another by full name and another by postcode, resulting in even more complexity.

“We wanted a ‘push’ not a ‘search’ solution so when an advisor locates a customer in the CRM system all relevant information is immediately delivered to them and they don’t have to interrogate back office systems to find information slowing down customer response times. We also wanted a solution that was going to provide accurate and secure customer information so we could control who sees what,” explained Amanda de Warr, democratic services manager, Wychavon District Council.

Direct integration from eShop to the back office systems was discounted as too complicated and costly so Wychavon searched for alternative solutions. Upon seeing a demonstration of SmartPoint, they realised that it was fit for purpose straightaway and ran a pilot in their Pershore one stop shop for a month with two members of the customer services team responsible for the trial and subsequent roll-out.

“We wanted the SmartPoint pilot to be driven by the customer services team from the outset. We started by surveying our staff for their top 10 most frequent customer enquiries, and then prioritised these results against what was achievable in the time frame,” said Cheryl Peters.

To date, Wychavon has implemented SmartPoint to connect to six of its systems including: IBS (revenue and benefits), Powersolve (financials), MapInfo (GIS), SPUR Si-Dem (notice processing and parking management), Abritas ‘Home choice Plus’ (housing management) and the online customer portal ‘My Local Area’ which provides huge amounts of information from electoral details and local amenities to property details. Plans are to connect to remaining applications in the near future and currently SmartPoint is now live in all three one stop shops in Wychavon local authority.

“With SmartPoint we believe we have been able to make savings and become leaner in the service that we provide to our customers. By delivering information more quickly, more accurately and having access to a wealth of information previously stored in silos, we don’t just resolve a customer’s query, we can now provide more value by having immediate visibility to other relevant services. For example, if a customer comes in and is on benefits, then the advisor can look in SmartPoint to see what additional benefits can be offered such as free bus travel,” summarised Jack Hegarty, managing director, Wychavon District Council.